a very fine, new, and grotesque idea

[tacccja]

welcome home, mother illuminata

[handweavers]

positioning public libraries as the primary solution to restricted information access assumes that the country you live in has public libraries + those libraries have the funding to pay for the right to access global information databases, which is something that even colleges and universities in many parts of the world cannot afford. it's pretty common for libraries including university libraries in many countries to be unable to provide access to research databases, with students entirely reliant on shadow libraries for basic course materials. even attending a western university that has enough capital to fund imperialist wars and the war bank (ex. the many colleges and universities in toronto) you are not guaranteed full access to these databases and end up reliant on shadow libraries regardless because of how these capitalist educational institutions choose to spend their money. open access is the only real solution this issue

[thistleburr]

17th century cargo ship, passing a modern cargo ship.

[greengableslover]

MOTHER MARY (2026) dir. David Lowery costume design: Bina Daigeler

[toiich]

Werner Herzog

[vedurnan]

6th grade math problem:

Words were exchanged between friends – the house of human companionship was established in secret – eons passed – eons passed – eons passed – eons passed

A) The house was diminished!

B) The house was strengthened!

C) The house was swept away!

D) The house was swept away!

[inanesinlovewithiwtv]

[avpol]

Minoans!

[horreurscopes]

hi i was so charmed by these tags from @mamadyke on my old lil zukaang sketch that i dug out this unfinished sketch from 2019 and was momentarily possessed by my teenage self and finished it and now i'm going to bed at 3 am. sorry i love a narrative foil ship and people are cowards

[cuties-in-codices]

looking around your posts, I can notice most of the manuscripts were written using a common font, do you have a clue what type of font it may be?

many of the manuscripts i post are written in a script called "bastarda" (here's a link to the german wikipedia article bc it includes more reference pictures than the english one). another common one is called "textura" or "textualis" (link). they both fall under the umbrella category of "blackletter" (link).

i know close to nothing about calligraphy though! if you want to ask more specific question, at the top of my head i would direct you to @theshitpostcalligrapher or @menciemeer :)

[shredsandpatches]

Manuscript librarian in the house! Regarding textualis and bastarda hands: medieval scripts (just like modern typography) tend to be used for different types of texts. This is particularly the case by the later Middle Ages though it's always true to at least an extent. There were varying levels of formality: a textualis script is called that because it was the kind of script you'd use for a biblical manuscript (if you're a medieval European the Bible is, of course, the text). There are also different levels of formality under the textualis umbrella: if you're looking at Northern European hands, it's generally the case that the straighter and pointier a script is, the more formal it is. It's more effort-intensive because you have to lift the pen more often and take more care with your pen strokes (and more pen strokes are required in formal hands).

On the other hand, if you're writing something that's more quick and dirty, like if you're a student copying out a university text for personal use or something like that, you're probably going to be writing in a cursive hand, which is so called from the Latin currere 'to run.' The major feature of cursive hands is that you don't have to lift the pen as much.

Bastarda scripts are called that because they combine features of the 'noble' textualis with the 'base' cursive. What can I say, medieval society was really classist. There's a similar hand called hybrida which is basically the same type of thing except that the features taken from textualis vs. cursive are different from the ones in bastarda scripts. In any event both of them are commonly used for literary texts, particularly in the vernacular, as well as non-biblical devotional texts. They're also related to the style of script used for government docs in the very late Middle Ages but that's a different kettle of fish entirely.

[cuties-in-codices]

Congrats on the bachelor’s. Ang good manuscripts about justice, torture and execution? Its for my end of studies project lol

sure! it kind of depends on what you're actually looking for though. i could point you to hundreds of manuscripts that portray gory martyrdoms, torture in hell, fictional executions etc. in some shape or form (see my latest compilation of isaiah being sawn in half!). those aren't necessarily indicative of real-world practices/norms of justice though, if that's what you're interested in. anyways, here's some stuff i had to think of that might or might not be relevant to your question. keep in mind i'm not an expert on the contents of these manuscripts, i just collect images. :)

1.) the livre de la vigne nostre seigneur (france, 1450–70) is, imo, the place to go if you're looking for cool depictions of hell, demons torturing sinners etc... as for real-world methods of execution, scenes like the one on fol. 30r might be somewhat insightful (christians being persecuted and tortured by the antichrist in various ways):

Oxford, Boudleain Library, MS. Douce 134, fol. 30r

2.) as for justice, i had to think of the sachsenspiegel, which "is one of the most important law books and custumals compiled during the holy roman empire" (wikipedia). here are some impression from a 14th c. edition, one of the first/original ones. every page is composed of the legal text on one side, and matching illustrations on the other. so, for example: at the bottom of the first image here (12v), there's an illustration for the law that said that pregnant women should only be penalized/tortured in a relatively mild way (penalties "on the skin and hair"):

Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Pal. germ. 164, fol. 12v and 20r

3.) here's another manuscript that contains illustrations of henchmen of the antichrist getting creative with torturing people (bavaria, c. 1440):

Berlin, SBB, Ms. germ. fol. 733, fol. 6v and 7r

4.) now this one's niche, but i personally really really love this 15th century (bavarian) series of images depicting ways in which various sinners/sins receive different eternal punishments in hell. each miniature is dedicated to a different cardinal sin or violation of one of the ten commandments. to give you an impression, here's a selection of sins and their punishments:

unchastity and gluttony:

envy and wrath:

adultery and false testimony:

Nürnberg, STN, Cent. V, App. 34a, fol. 114r-123r

regarding medieval ideas of justice, i feel like this series illustrates the same concept that can be found in dante's divine comedy: "the punishment of souls by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself" (see contrapasso).

so those were just some manuscripts that came to mind -- maybe some of this was useful to you, either way best wishes for your project. :)

[avpol]

This guy again

[cuties-in-codices]

16th c. spectacular fireworks machines

miniatures from a richly illustrated manuscript of friedrich meyer's büchsenmeister- und feuerwerksbuch, a book on gunsmithing and the pyrotechnical arts for entertainment as well as military purposes. produced in strasbourg (?), 1594

source: Munich, BSB, Cgm 8143, ff. 143r, 135v-136r, and 145r

on the culture of early modern fireworks spectacles see, among others, kevin salatino: incendiary art: the representation of fireworks in early modern europe (1997) [link to pdf]

[kocourovina]

he's my last son

[boundwithpurple]

i just don’t think alicent is fundamentally opposed to violence or war. she is practical about having to use violence to advance a goal, and does it herself - she just has unacceptable limits that she hits, like rhaenyra’s murder or sending helaena to war against her will. but tellingly, in both cases she orders violence or accedes to violence to achieve the goal she herself seeks. she tries to stop one instance of violence unacceptable to herself, but must permit other kinds of violence to occur to do so. to save rhaenyra and her family in 1.09 she has larys burn down mysaria’s spy operation, and though the show is a bit frustratingly vague on this, it seems clear that this is done with the intent of killing the people who work for mysaria - just destroying the building wouldn’t achieve much. she agrees to aegon’s murder in 2.08 to save helaena. i think she experiences significant distress at both acts. she has an abhorrence of violence that is a thread throughout the show, from her anxiety at the bloodshed at the tourney in 1.01 to her horror at the violence of her own outburst in 1.07. but she does do them, and accept she has to do them, to acquire the (often limited) power to achieve her specific ends…which is exactly what she’s telling rhaenyra she’ll have to do in all we’ve gotten of her s3 so far!

she is a power player in a very violent political system that she has survived for a long time in, and regardless of her ambivalence, i just do not see the figure criston’s partial and sexist view conjures - a woman too tender and good to confront violence as a reality, and therefore unfitting to head a government prosecuting a war. it’s equally telling her moments of resistance, of using power for herself rather than others, are centered around the love of women, and work against the goals of the men who try to control her. but it can’t really undo the patriarchal power structure, as it is often posited to do via a richean lesbian continuum kind of framework - she has to work within it, always. none of alicent’s relationships with women can ever be extricated from hierarchies of power or said to be working against it in any neat way, at least so far. alicent saves rhaenyra’s life, but the only way she can do that is by seeking and affirming power for aegon. it doesn’t disrupt monarchal power, it actually affirms it, while working to strip rhaenyra of power. she later capitulates to rhaenyra for helaena, but it entails affirming rhaenyra’s pursuit of power, because safety for helaena is dependent on rhaenyra gaining power. these female bonds do not have any straightforward, inherent political purpose or function. they always affirm power as much as they disturb it, they might redistribute it or fight specific unacceptable ends, but they are too tied up in this system for it to ever fundamentally disrupt it. but that has great meaning to me! life is often not made up of radical acts or breaks, which most of us have few real opportunities for, but a more complex negotiation of accommodations and resistances that can still profoundly shape lives.

[825]

The Unicorn Defends Himself, 1495-1505. from The Hunt of The Unicorn tapestry series

[slowtides]

Jenny Holzer, "Marquees," 1993 (from the collection of Don Shewey)